Authentic Experience, Faves

Trustworthy: What the Scout Manual Didn’t Say

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2010 marks the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America. It’s been a fascinating century for an organization that’s had its share of grief. Allegations of exclusion (it is a private organization after all), sexual misconduct scandals to rival the Catholic church, and of course that summer when the punks from Troop 316 shot water balloons at our camp’s first-ever female waterfront director. Yes, it’s somewhat amazing the BSA is still standing at attention one hundred years later.

I’d been thinking about how to salute the Boy Scouts this year, for I am indeed an Eagle Scout, and it finally dawned on me all of two days ago. I decided to write one blog a month on each of the twelve points of the Scout Law. As any Tenderfoot worth his merit badges should be able to recite, A Scout is:

Trustworthy
Loyal
Helpful
Friendly
Courteous
Kind
Obedient
Cheerful
Thrifty
Brave
Clean
and Reverent

It’s not insignificant that I’m writing “Trustworthy” with mere hours until I would miss my self-imposed deadline. If it weren’t for the last minute, there would be no trustworthiness in the world.

As a kid— in the thick of those scouting years— trustworthiness is easy to comprehend and not particularly difficult to abide by. Just do what you say you will do. Case in point, in the summer before my 18th birthday I committed to finally earn my Eagle Scout rank. There’s a strict rule surrounding that honor: miss your 18th birthday by even one minute and you can never become an Eagle.

The odd thing was that I’d reached the previous rank a full five years earlier. Talk about earning the skill award for procrastination. But actually it was more about a teenage would-be intellectual. I was a freckle-faced rebel without a clue. I started having misgivings about the scouting organization in some of those years and somehow I thought I was better than these arbitrary ranks that required adherence to stodgy oaths and requirements.

What turned me around and lit a fire under me for that final summer was a recollection of the 11 year old who had graduated from Cubs to Boy Scouts. Back then I’d told myself I would one day be an Eagle Scout, like my dad and my grandpa. And it was honoring that curly haired kid’s dream that saw me through the mad scramble to fill all those requirements in one busy summer before college.

What they didn’t tell us scouts in the manual was that in the grown-up world, while it’s really an indisputable virtue, trustworthiness can damn near kill you. In my workaholic days, I’d burn through 80 hour weeks and the occasional 20-hour workday just to deliver on my own overeager promises and the utterly impossible requests of others. Those seem to be fairly common characteristics of a business world that says you can find balance in your life when you’re dead.

But a little wordplay would have helped: being worthy of trust is not as heavy a shackle as flawlessly delivering on every promise, every polite request, and every asinine demand placed on the foolish young pawns of the work world.

What still works for me is making sure I’m worthy of the trust of a certain freckle-faced boy I once knew. When we earn the trust of the children we once were— well that’s someone a kid can look up to.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,
Greg

Photo by SteamboatDigs

Tower of Song

Where Can I Get a Robot that Plays Herbie Mann?

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“Where can I get a robot that plays Herbie Mann?” —from Kurt Catlin, written on my Facebook wall

Thank you for that little catapult ride back to my youth, Kurt. Ten words, like smells from grandma’s kitchen, like the feel of that favorite flannel, like a man on oxygen performing under a Jazz Fest tent in 2003 … The past is not as far off as we think. All it takes is a whiff or a riff.

Back when Kurt and I lived on Coachman Drive, I received a gift from my mom the teacher: 2-XL. It was an educational toy, a plastic robot that played 8-track tapes with multiple-choice adventures. I discovered it would play music as well and purchased my first-ever recording from a garage sale: Herbie Mann’s Turtle Bay.

Flash forward to Jazz Fest 2003 and you would find me leaving the rest of my buddies at the Widespread show (don’t hate me) to see Herbie Mann on the jazz stage. I walked into the tent decades the younger of everyone else already seated. Herbie made his way onstage with help, toting an oxygen tank and teetering his way precariously to a barstool centerstage. For the next hour or so I found myself near tears, so caught up in a solid performance that belied Herbie’s few remaining days on earth.

They say smell has the most powerful ability of all the other senses to transport us back to experiences of our past. But music packs an emotional punch that goes way beyond nostalgia or recollection. I sat there and realized I had listened to Turtle Bay thousands of times. It was my only music until a second garage sale turned up the soundtrack to The Wiz (complete with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson on “Ease on Down the Road”) and I loved every track. I would get sent to my room (not deliberately, I swear— and no, mom, I wasn’t being picky about dinner: I was being discerning) and there was 2-XL, Herbie Mann, and a few roundtrips through all 8 tracks, boogying to the funky jazz flute sounds of 1973.

My love for that flute, those perky rhythms, that complex musical experimentation made me a guaranteed fan the first time my brother played Jethro Tull. Another flautist, this time in a progressive rock band, and I was hooked. Luckily Ian Anderson of Tull is not on oxygen yet and I have seen him perform live ten times. I am also decades younger than the average Tull fan. But I digress.

Soaking in that Herbie Mann sound under the shaded jazz tent of pre-Katrina New Orleans, it all went in one ear and— for once— not out the other one. I saw the foundation of my musical preferences, I became living proof of the enduring power of music, and I saw how art can bridge generations. I even saw how it can cheat death. Herbie never performed again and died just two months after that performance, but I have since sought out vinyl— then, later, MP3s— of “Turtle Bay” and I continue to find “discerning” ways to get sent to my room.

Ain’t it funny how a melody can bring back a memory?
—Clint Black, “State of Mind” 1993

By the way, Kurt Catlin is a funkified musician himself. Next time you’re in Seoul, git ya Somah Dat. Thanks for reading. Cheers,
Greg

Photos by Tom Marcello (2)

Faves, Flickering Images

The Umbilical Bus Toward Death

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Kitty’s “Exit” painting spoke to me. I’m not sure I understand all she said, but I nodded and stroked my chin so she would think I knew. She’s quiet now, introspective, as paintings sometimes get, so I can stare a while without her becoming self conscious.

Two figures— dancers to me— stand on a platform suspended from an umbilical cord that runs up from Birth (an ovoid squiggly womb shape) to Death (the “exit” sign). One figure probes its bellybutton, no doubt pondering the umbilical cord that once attached mother. The other figure holds a dramatic pose, leaning over the edge, eyes forced closed, and hands shaping a graceful, ritualized symbol for an emotion the dancer has not felt personally. To train your body to hold poses that so universally represent a singular emotion is to abandon the possibility of feeling that emotion yourself, at least the way other people feel it. And that may be O.K., since it’s all pretty much about suffering anyway.

Another thought: both figures seem to focus their energy downward, toward the womb and its organic, mysterious curves and undulations, toward origins and the vast red pool at the bottom of it all— the Unknown. Looming over their heads is simple, logical clarity— an “exit” sign.  All our lives we perplex ourselves with the past and with the unknowable while the obvious truth goes unnoticed just over our heads: we are riding an umbilical bus toward Death.

By the way, “exit” is sort of backwards— it reads more clearly in the rearview mirror, like the front of an ambulance closing in on us.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,
Greg

Painting by Katherine “Kitty” Gibbons, photo by Boo-Creative.